As High As an Elephant's Eye

They call the wind Mariah.

I put off growing sweet corn my whole life.

It’s too fussy. It takes up too much room. The price of confetti on the Chicago commodities market is too high. You know. The usual.

Three years ago I accidentally wandered into the Sweet Corn chapter of Pam Dowling’s book Sustainable Market Farming. There she wrote:

On the other hand, corn doesn’t take a lot of work, so if you have the space but are short of help, it’s a good choice.

Sold!

There was a bit of field bordering the garden that I reasoned might make for a suitable mini-cornfield. And this plan had the added benefit of providing an excuse to get new widgets for the tractor. The devil gave me a good crop the first year and I haven’t looked back.

This year I planted three varieties: Latte, Bodacious, and Silver Queen. The straw-hat wizards claim you must plant in blocks of at least 4 rows in order to get good fertilization and, thus, full ears. Not one to cross the wizards, I put in 4 by 15-foot rows of each variety for a total of 12 rows. These varieties have different times to maturity, with Latte being the earliest at 68 days, and Silver Queen the latest at 96 days. With that stagger, I can plant them all at once and then have ripe corn to harvest over a period of several weeks starting in late summer.

That’s me in the banner image above standing in this year’s Silver Queen planting trying to figure out how to get back to Kansas. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.

You will remember Silver Queen. It was the white sweet corn of our youth. If you ever went to the farmers’ markets over in Webster county, Silver Queen was sure to be everywhere and in big demand. The problem with Silver Queen, for the commercial farmer, is that its sugars turn to wallpaper paste quickly; in a matter of hours. So over the years it has been replaced with new hybrid varieties whose ears can be put in plastic wrap and transported around the globe. They look pretty. And they taste, well, like sugar. That’s why I grow Silver Queen in my very own corn field.

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Recently I’ve had second thoughts about the “doesn’t take much work” part, however. The devil gets his due.

A growing corn plant has a point-source stalk stuck in the ground, with which it tries to control a system of giant leaf-like sails flapping around up top. Not surprisingly, it gets blown over. Early in July we had a ferocious wind storm and it blew all the Silver Queen to the ground. My poor corn field looked like a fresh game of Pickup Sticks. Once blown to the ground, corn stalks try to bend upward toward the sun, but they are basically done for. I tried that experiment last season. And the season before.

This is passing curious. You can’t convince me that the maize grown by indigenous cultures, back before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, that their corn blew down in wind storms. Maybe blame modern plant genetics for breeding sail planes? Actually, it is very hard to believe that Webster county farmers, circa 1960, routinely lost half their crop of Silver Queen to the winds blowing it down either. I have no good answer.

Modern gardening books just shrug it off as part of the cost of speculating in the sweet corn business, and advise tying the corn up with twine. (I try to imagine that hypothetical Webster county farmer out in the field tying up a couple acres of Silver Queen.) Anyway, that is what I did this year. I put U-bar posts at the ends of each row, ran nursery twine down one side of the corn and then, carefully lifting up the crumpled corn, I ran the twine back up the other side. Finally, I tied the two strands of twine together between each stalk, trapping it in the middle. As of this writing, everybody is upright.